26 Quotes by Leonard Woolf

The violent but narrow passions that pass under the name of patriotism are not the noblest forms of human and social emotions. The world, or the people who, unfortunately, have most to say in governing the world, believe no such thing, and will not believe it when the representatives of States meet again to decide how to fill up the graves which they helped dig in Europe.

Suddenly I heard Virginia’s voice calling to me from the sitting room window: “Hitler is making a speech.” I shouted back, “I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.

Novels by serious writers of genius often eventually become best-sellers, but most contemporary best-sellers are written by second-class writers whose psychological brew contains a touch of naïvety, a touch of sentimentality, the story-telling gift, and a mysterious sympathy with the day-dreams of ordinary people.

They say: 'Come to tea and let us comfort you.' But it's no good. One must be crucified on one's own private cross. I know that V. will not come across the garden from the lodge, & yet I look in that direction for her. I know that she is drowned & yet I listen for her to come in at the door. I know that it is the last page & yet I turn it over. There is no limit to one's stupidity & selfishness.

I believe profoundly in two rules. Justice and mercy – they seem to me the foundation of all civilized life and society, if you include under mercy, toleration.

It is just as easy to use a good principle for bad ends as it is to use a bad principle for good ends.

The idea is more horny on paper than in practice.

It is never right for any individual or government to do any vast evil as a means to some hypothetical good.

Life is not an orderly progression, self-contained like a musical scale or a quadratic equation... If one is to record one's life truthfully, one must aim at getting into the record of it something of the disorderly discontinuity which makes it so absurd, unpredictable, bearable.